Seeing Jerusalem anew

Many of us who travel to Israel frequently risk becoming jaded. Obsessed by Realpolitik, the peace process, internecine and ultimately … Continued

by Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Many of us who travel to Israel frequently risk becoming jaded. Obsessed by Realpolitik, the peace process, internecine and ultimately unproductive Jewish political polemics, philanthropic hype, or just plain business concerns, we lose sight of Israel’s true significance.

Two weeks ago, my friend Robert Fagenson asked me to accompany him on a four-day whirlwind trip to Jerusalem to participate in the Western Wall Bar Mitzvah ceremony of his partner’s grandson. Robert is a prominent Wall Street Executive, a former Vice Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and a life-long member of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El. He had been to Israel twice before, the last time in 1968.

As our plane flies over the Israeli coast line on Wednesday afternoon, Robert is amazed at the urban Tel Aviv sprawl the rest of us have come to take for granted. He remembers a far less developed landscape, predominated by sand dunes rather than skyscrapers and industrial complexes.

That evening in Jerusalem, we walk through the pedestrian Mamilla Mall, from the foot of King David Street to the Jaffa Gate. The old and new cities, two separate universes for decades, are now intrinsically linked by a succession of stores, art galleries, and cafés that put the spotlight on the exigencies of daily life.

The Thursday morning service at the Western Wall is simultaneously moving and more than a bit chaotic. The plaza is filled with different family groups each calling a 13-year-old to the Torah for the first time. Ashkenazi and Sephardic melodies vie with one another to create a mostly atonal yet authentic blend. As Avi, the Bar Mitzvah boy, is wrapped in his prayer shawl, his talit, there are tears in his grandfather’s eyes. Marty Vegh’s journey, from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany to Staten Island, New York, and now to Jerusalem, epitomizes the globalization of the Jewish people in the aftermath of World War II. Robert is the first to be called up to read from the Torah. He is now part of not so much a historical chain than an infinite tapestry.

A few hours later, we are welcomed at the Israel Museum by its director, James Snyder. Robert’s uncle and aunt, Joseph and Sylvia Slifka, donated some of the museum’s major works, including a magnificent Miro and exquisite Jean Arp and Max Ernst sculptures. As we see them in the midst of an impressive, world class collection of Impressionist and contemporary art, we could just as easily be in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan or the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. Until, that is, we walk a few steps further and find ourselves in synagogues that have been relocated from different countries in Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere. Somehow, they put the Pissarros, Monets and Chagalls in perspective.

We are then shown a collection of works of art and craft created in Jerusalem at the Bezalel School between 1906 and 1929 that Robert’s cousin Alan Slifka, who died earlier this year, had given to the Israel Museum. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Boris Schatz, a Lithuanian born Jewish artist, undertook to implement in Palestine a new decorative craftsmanship, along the lines advocated by John Ruskin in England but rooted in Middle Eastern folk styles and infused with an often intangible, elusive Jewish spark. We are suddenly conscious of a time before the Holocaust, before the world went utterly mad, when the forging of a modern Jewish nation required not just Zionist ideology and political philosophy, not just building cities and kibbutzim in a hurry and training idealists to become soldiers, but the creation, indeed the invention, of a new Israeli, as opposed to simply Jewish, culture.

On Friday morning, we go to the museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. I watch Robert absorb the testimonies of both the dead and the survivors. Warsaw Ghetto cobblestones. A model of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Reflections and echoes of murdered Jewish children whose ghosts haunt the galleries and, henceforth, our subconscious. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly threatens the State of Israel with genocidal annihilation. Perhaps every world leader, every United Nations diplomat, every journalist who covers Middle East political developments should walk through the Yad Vashem museum so as to grasp why Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hezbollah are little more than reincarnations of blind, implacable Nazi evil. Emerging into the sun-lit Judean hills, we have a new appreciation of Israel’s critical role as a haven for any Jew threatened by persecution anywhere in the world.

From Yad Vashem, we return to the Western Wall where Rabbi Jay Marcus, a Staten Island rabbi who settled in Israel a few years ago, guides us through the tunnels that have been excavated alongside what had been one of the retaining walls of the Temple Mount in Herodian times. We proceed underground for more than 1,500 feet, all the while feeling stones that stand silent witness to a Jewish presence here centuries before the birth of Muhammad ibn Abdullah.

Of course Jerusalem is sacred to Christians and Muslims as well as to Jews. But the city is central only to Judaism. It is also far too often forgotten that during close to two decades of Jordanian rule, from 1948 until 1967. Jews were forbidden to set foot in the old city of Jerusalem and much of the Jewish Quarter was destroyed and desecrated. Today, Muslims, Christians and Jews worship here freely.

Sometime soon, I hope to see Jerusalem through the eyes of our twin grandchildren, now two- and-three-quarters years old. In the meantime, as our plane lifts into the sky several hours after the end of Shabbat, I am grateful to Robert for enabling me to remember that both Israel and Jerusalem must be experienced, not just visited, to be absorbed and understood.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Lecturer in Law at Columbia Laws School, Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law, and Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants

Not only is Jerusalem central only to the Jewish people (Christians have Rome, Muslims, Mecca), only Israel has invested so much in Jerusalem and developed it into a huge city where people of all faiths can meet.

As for KingofKings, look out of your window and the view the city that I know you love too. You also belong here.

YEAL9

O’ Israel- Its formation was approved by the UN in 1948. It should honor the original UN agreement and live within the described borders. Considering the hate generated by passages in the koran and torah, erecting dividing walls between Muslims and Jews was a good idea. It should continue. UN forces should control these walls.

And Jerusalem should be made into an international city under the control and protection of the UN.

Bluefish2012

Muslims worship in Jeruisalem freely? Au contraire, professor. We hosted an intern from Bethlehem University this summer. This young lady’s grandmother lives mere minutes fom the oh-so ironic “Wall” and less than 5 miles from Jerusalem. Yet she can only get a pass to visit her grandmother twice a year if she’s lucky, never mind visit Jerusalem to worship there. And even when she can go there, she must wait hours to get through checkpoints manned by gun-toting Israeli soldiers no older than herself. She’s not even allowed to communicate with peer Israeli students in Jerusalem–it is hard after all to shoot a Palestinian that you know.

When I went through those same checkpoints last fall, I can tell you having those soldiers with American-financed guns board a bus full of Americans on pilgrimmage made me do a slow burn.

How arrogant is it to say that Jerusalem is only central to Judaism? Peace and forgiveness can only come with justice–and what we are witnessing by Israeli behavior is not justice.

shilotoren

UNR 181 suggested partiton, but the Arabs rejected it and the UN did nothing when 7 Arab armies invaded in order to kill all the Jews living in Israel. The UN, instead of protecting Jerusalem, allowed the Arab Legion to invade it in an effort to starve the Jewish side of the city and capture for itself. The Jordanians shelled all areas of the city relentlessly and the UN did nothing.

Nix to the UN.

As for the Koran and the Torah, you forgot to add to the list the New Testament. Christians are not ones to preach about peace….unless they are hypocrites.

shilotoren

Moslems yes, but residents of the PA no. Too many people from Bethleham have used to freedom of movement to murder other people in Jerusalem.